RE: Minimal Browser Capabilities

The fact that IE does not crash is correct behavior.
Browsers should forgive the mistakes of the page writer after all the user
didnt make them and presumably the author did try to convey information..
On the other hand authoring tools should not allow you to make bad code.
A BMW car has an extremely good ABS system to make up for the driver's
braking mistakes,it does not crash if the driver makes a minor mistake, this
does not mean that the driver should drive badly.
If you want browsers to crash on bad input do you also want cars to?  :)))))



Harry Woodrow


-----Original Message-----
From: w3c-wai-ig-request@w3.org [mailto:w3c-wai-ig-request@w3.org]On
Behalf Of Vadim Plessky
Sent: Saturday, 29 December 2001 5:45 PM
To: w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
Subject: Re: Minimal Browser Capabilities


On Friday 28 December 2001 18:53, David Woolley wrote:
|   > I mean: it's up to browser not to render broken content.
|   > The fact that MS IE and Netscape render broken content doesn't say
|   > anything good in their favour.
|
|   Rendering broken content is commercially sound.  It avoids people
blaming
                                                ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
|   your software for what are really authors' mistakes and it reduces your
|   support costs.  The evolutionary pressure is to cope with at least as

Exactly!
And, by the way, this explains why Netscape6 and Mozilla have so bad
acceptance  (~0.75% of all browsers, less than 1% - and that 1 year after
NS6
release!)
Mozilla sacrificied document.layers DOM (which was present in NN 4.x
series),
and offered no sound replacement.
And while W3C standards' support in Mozilla is very good, product itself is
not "commercially sound" (I use your words :-)

Just to clarify my position a little bit: I wish success to Mozilla.
But I doubt it can be successfull in its current state.

|   broken content as your competitors.
|
|   It is also compatible with one of the core internet principles, which is
|   that you must be correct in what you send (authors should produce
correct
|   HTML) and tolerant in what you accept (browsers should work with broken
|   HTML).

Hopefully, even MS IE bombs you on broken (not well-formed) XML.
So, the real chance for all of us to come away from "broken content" is to
accelerate transition to XML (not XHTML, which is *again* intermediary
solution!) and sacrifice all HTML 4.0, 3.2, etc.
So, I would love to see "XML support" in "Minimal Browser Capabilities", and
all browsers not supporting XML falling into "non-conforming" category :-))

--

Vadim Plessky
http://kde2.newmail.ru  (English)
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http://kde2.newmail.ru/kde_themes.html
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Received on Saturday, 29 December 2001 04:20:12 UTC